七人制橄榄球中的区域优势：当没有队伍在主场时，是否存在主场效应？
Regional advantage in rugby sevens: Is there a home effect when nobody is home?
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中文总结 AI 辅助
该研究以2016-2025年国际七人制橄榄球赛事数据为基础，发现无正式主场队伍时，七人制橄榄球的区域优势是队伍特定的，而非普遍存在，部分队伍表现随主办地距离增加而下降。
中文摘要 AI 辅助
我们研究七人制橄榄球中是否存在“区域差异（Regional Differential）”：在没有参赛队伍享有正式主场资格的赛事中，是否存在一些国家队会根据赛事举办地的不同，系统性地表现出超常或失常。我们使用2016年至2025年间国际七人制橄榄球赛事的全部2672场男子和女子比赛，这些赛事主要是世界橄榄球七人制系列赛，还包括七人制橄榄球世界杯和奥运会。我们将经典主场优势研究中的二元“主场性”指标替换为各队伍与主办国之间地理、时间和文化接近度的连续度量。我们发现，接近度与表现之间的总体关联（在朴素模型中表现显著且数值较大）几乎完全是“队伍构成”和“赛程安排”的假象：一旦通过对称队伍-比赛面板中的固定效应吸收队伍和对手的质量，就不再存在普遍的区域优势。但这一总体无效结果掩盖了显著的异质性。对于一组明确界定的队伍（最显著的是法国，还有新西兰、美国、加拿大、西班牙、爱尔兰、肯尼亚、萨摩亚和巴西），表现随主办城市与主场的距离增加而显著且单调下降。一些老牌南半球强队（斐济、南非、澳大利亚、阿根廷）基本不受距离影响。我们进一步发现，部分队伍的表现梯度是由东西向时差而非单纯位移导致的。因此，七人制橄榄球中的区域差异是真实存在的，但属于“队伍特定”而非普遍现象，这一区别被混合估计所掩盖。
英文摘要
We study the existence of a \emph{Regional Differential} in rugby sevens: whether, in tournaments where no competing team enjoys formal home status, some national sides systematically over- or under-perform depending on \emph{where} the event is staged. Using the universe of 2672 men's and women's matches from international rugby sevens tournaments played between 2016 and 2025, principally the World Rugby Sevens Series, but also the World Cup Sevens and the Olympic Games, we replace the binary ``locality'' indicator of the classic home advantage literature with continuous measures of geographic, temporal, and cultural proximity between each team and the host country. We show that aggregate associations between proximity and performance (which appear large and highly significant in naive specifications) are almost entirely an artifact of \emph{team composition} and \emph{scheduling}: once team and opponent quality are absorbed through fixed effects in a symmetric team-match panel, no general regional advantage survives. However, this null aggregate masks substantial heterogeneity. For a well-defined subset of teams (most notably France, but also New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Spain, Ireland, Kenya, Samoa, and Brazil), performance declines significantly and monotonically with the distance separating the host city from home. Some of the established southern-hemisphere powers (Fiji, South Africa, Australia, Argentina) are essentially distance-neutral. We further show that for some teams the gradient operates through east-west jet lag rather than pure displacement. The Regional Differential in sevens is therefore real but \emph{team-specific} rather than universal, a distinction obscured by pooled estimation.
